Kelly and Jeff Mirabella talk through recreational youth softball the way it actually goes. Practice plans that survive contact with eight year olds, the calls you get wrong, the parents in the bleachers, and the stuff nobody tells you before your first season.
Most softball advice is written for travel teams with paid coaches and year round rosters. That is not most of us. This show is for the volunteer who got handed a roster in February and a bucket of scuffed balls in March.
Drills you can run with twelve kids, one field, and ninety minutes, including the ones we tried that flopped.
Playing time conversations, parent expectations, and keeping a dugout of ten year olds engaged in the fourth inning.
Coaching the bases, when to send a runner, and what to say to a kid who just struck out looking.
We coach, we sit on a league board, and we make plenty of mistakes. We talk about those too, on purpose.
“My favorite part of coaching is helping players fall in love with the sport.”Coach Kelly
Everything you need before the first practice, in one printable PDF. We wrote it for the parent who volunteered in February, has never coached anything, and just got a roster and a phone number list.
Free, no email required. Read it online or download a copy. Want more like this? Join the monthly note below.
We are Kelly and Jeff Mirabella, and we have been part of the softball community for more than nine years. Our daughters, Aria and Gia, both started T-ball at age 4 and have played every season since. Along the way we have won a lot of games, lost a lot of games, and learned something from every one of them.
Jeff played high school baseball, then got his start in coaching with his brother's T-ball team. He still plays rec slow pitch softball. He spent several years on the PBSA board and coached our girls' teams, first as an assistant and then as head coach. His goal is to develop girls into competitive players who love the game and have the skills to play varsity ball in high school and beyond, if they want to.
Kelly started as a team mom. About four seasons ago she moved into the dugout as an assistant coach for both girls' teams, and in spring 2027 she takes over as head coach of the 12U team while Jeff moves up to 14U with our oldest. She also served on the PBSA board as Director of Marketing and Community Outreach. Her number one goal as a coach is to help girls fall in love with softball and build confidence as athletes and as young women.
Today we both serve on the Cherry Creek Little League board, where we are working to grow the softball program. The show is named after the lookback rule, because most of coaching is looking back at what just happened and deciding what to do next time.
